


Fire Sermon

by kuebikowrites



Category: Naruto
Genre: ALL THE GOOD STUFF, Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blind!Kakashi, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kannabi Bridge Mission, Mild Gore, Third Shinobi War, by which i mean horrific violence against child soldiers during war
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 05:43:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16780786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuebikowrites/pseuds/kuebikowrites
Summary: War is no place for children, no place for young war heroes, no place for innocence. Rin's rescue on the Kannabi mission goes better, and then worse. The Hokage baptizes his ninjas in fire, and Team Minato will be no different.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. -- TS Eliot, "The Waste Land"

The ground shivered. The ceiling groaned.

“ _Run!_ ”

Kakashi’s frantic shout might well have been a whisper against the roaring rockfall, but they didn’t need to hear the cue to flee. Obito’s feet wrenched themselves off the trembling ground as Kakashi and Rin did the same, and Team Minato surged towards the pocket of daylight ahead.

Obito could feel his bones rattle in time with the rumbling thunder, the world crashing down on every side. In his sharingan-filtered view, he saw the crumbling rocks tumble through syrup; each strike sending giant ochre flowers blooming, unfurling dusty petals into his mouth and nose until he could barely breathe. The ground vanished beneath his feet and he stumbled, tripping forwards, then taking off again with fragile balance.

It was like he’d been thrown into the middle of a very angry raincloud. An angry brown-tinged raincloud with human-sized hailstones.

And if he was in a raincloud, then Kakashi and Rin’s chakras were the lightning; bright and flaring, they thrummed wildly ahead of him, sharp-edged with desperation.

The glimmer of light ahead expanded. Sunlight shaded the shadows brighter. Hope, weakly flickering, dared to creep up between Obito’s ribs again because _they were going to make it –_

Kakashi hit the ground with a cry.

The ceiling came apart above him with a deafening _crack_ and dropped half its mass on top of them.

_Those who abandon their teammates…_

Obito didn’t think, didn’t hesitate.

_…are worse…_

Kakashi was a _friend_ now; he’d come back for Obito, for Rin, instead of throwing himself at the mission.

_…than trash!_

He snatched his friend up by the crossed straps of his uniform and _threw_ him towards the light.

The boulder kept falling.

“Obito!” Rin screamed. She’d made it out before them. Her figure was limned with gold. “Sharingan!”

His eyes burned on their own accord. His fingers scrambled to keep up, half a heartbeat behind Rin’s flickering digits. He reached for his core, clawing for threads of hastily moulded chakra, and _shoved_ a chunk into the last Tiger seal—

Something heavy brushed against his hair—

The world cut off with a violent _snap_.

There was darkness. White-hot pain screamed up his right arm. Dust tickled his nose, and a rock dug into his stomach.

“Get _off_ , you oaf.”

The dust at his nose moved in a very un-dust-like way. The rock at his stomach was sharp and strangely warm and jabbed irritably at his sternum. Obito blinked once, twice, then considered rescinding his view on the wilful abandonment of teammates. His target glared up at him through one dark eye, silver hair in disarray. The remarkably refreshing feeling of being alive faded rapidly.

“You’re welcome,” he bit back automatically, scrambling off Kakashi like one would a very prickly cactus. In the wake of the hasty movement, stinging pain ripped through his forearm instantly, sending stars exploding across his vision.

He staggered, careened sideways and braced his left side for an impact.

Warm hands caught him around the shoulders, righting him back on his feet. A cool sensation bubbled and rippled over the burning pain.

_Kakashi sure as hell didn’t know a thing about healing_ , was his first thought. Which meant—

The stars dissolved. A very familiar pair of doe-brown eyes replaced the unpleasant sparking. Obito let out an incoherent noise of surprise, flailing wildly backwards and becoming very aware of the heat in his cheeks.

“You will _stand still_ ,” Rin ordered, catching Obito as he veered unsteadily towards part of the rockpile that seemed to be made up of several precariously stacked boulders. Her palms lit up with green again. “The chakra pathways in your right arm are heavily injured and I need to heal them.”

“It’s not…” Obito protested weakly, embarrassed at his poor chakra control. That his control had suffered from the time crunch seemed unimportant. Threads of sky-blue staggered across his arm, like cracks in dry ceramic. “It doesn’t hurt…”

It did, like a bitch, but there was no way he’d tell Rin that.

Brushing dust off his clothes somewhere behind Rin, Kakashi had less qualms about airing Obito’s weaknesses. He gave an incredulous grunt. “What a _great_ idea, deadlast,” he muttered, with a tone that could strip paint thrice over. “Don’t bother about your wounds. Let’s just send you out into battle behind enemy lines while you’re unable to use anything more than basic taijutsu, ninjutsu or genjutsu. See how well _you_ survive against Iwa jounin.”

Obito’s mood flipped so fast he was certain he’d never recover from the whiplash. “Fuck you,” he snapped, “I saved your fucking ass, you ungrateful—”

“I’m going out to scout the area for any remaining enemies,” Kakashi cut him off sharply, slipping effortlessly back into the role of a captain, that bastard. “That Iwa jounin is probably still out there. Rin, finish up healing Obito, but don’t come up unless I say it’s safe.” He leapt upwards without a backward glance, bounding twice against the towering rock piles towards the opening above them that Obito noticed for the first time since his literal brush with death.

“Obito,” Kakashi said suddenly, hanging off the edge of the opening with his left hand, silhouetted black against the bright sky. “Thanks.” Then he’d hauled himself out and vanished.

Obito gaped. He could feel the surprised flicker in Rin’s chakra lapping against his arm too.

“What _happened_?” she asked, with a look and tone that could have been the mutant child of abject fascination and distress.

“I… Uh, well…” Obito stuttered his way into an explanation. What _had_ he done? “I shouted at him? And uh…punched him, and called his dad a hero?” He paused, looking at Rin’s utterly bemused expression and mirroring the emotions exactly. “I think that’s it. I’m not sure.”

Rin blinked.

“Oh!” Obito yelped. “You saved me! With that super-fast jutsu! And I didn’t say thanks…” He glanced away, absolutely mortified. His hand sought refuge at the back of his neck, which had warmed uncomfortably.

“It was just a simple telepor--”

Steel sang, clear as birdsong. A series of metallic crashes rang out overhead.

Obito’s face went from blushing red to deathly white so fast, his head spun from the blood loss.

“ _Kakashi_ ,” Rin whispered. Her face was deathly pale beneath purple tattoos. Green chakra lit her pallor a sickly shade before she snapped the Shousen jutsu off abruptly.

Obito swallowed nervously. A hoarse shout sprang into the clouds. Steel clashed again.

_Not until I say so_ , Kakashi had ordered, but Obito knew you didn’t just leave teammates to fend off enemies alone, no matter how much of a prodigy that teammate was; just like you didn’t leave captured teammates in the hands of the enemy. If anything, three people were more likely to win a fight than a single shinobi, right?

“We need to help.” His mouth moved on its own, before he’d realised.

The sentiment didn’t _need_ to be said; Obito knew they would do anything ( _most_ things; exceptions included obeying orders) to keep Kakashi safe anyway, but to hear the words spoken aloud… It was as if new strength had been breathed into Obito’s hardening resolve, and shaved some of the nervous edge off.

Metal _screeched,_ like the piercing cry of birds of prey. Obito’s ears rang.

Rin’s lips pulled into a thin, white line. She looked up and met his gaze with eyes swimming with worry, but the rigid lines of her shoulders promised a fight to the end. She nodded, a small and determined nod.

They leapt for the exit, feet sticky with chakra. Obito pointedly ignored the self-doubt niggled at the back of his mind that scratched at his intent. For the tiniest moment, he considered stepping back; obeying his captain’s orders.

“Your captain’s going to die if you don’t get out here, kids,” a voice called out, chillingly serene.

So much for following orders.

Rin let out the tiniest gasp as she latched onto the edge of the opening. Half a step away from her, Obito’s chakra control slipped; he glanced off his foothold, scrabbled wildly at the rocks and managed to slap a chakra-laced palm to the nearest boulder. In the heavy silence, the sound was deafening.

There was a small scuffle outside, then Kakashi’s voice, sharp and shaded with panic, “There’s no o–”

A muffled grunt. A small cry of pain.

Obito’s heart lodged in his throat. Fear tore through his ribcage. He scrambled over the edge. Rin came up beside him, a kunai slipping into her hand.

_Oh shit_ , was his first thought.

_We should have thought this out_ , was his next.

Kakashi was slumped on his knees, captive in the hold of the Iwa jounin that had set the entire cave on them. One dark eye was narrowed; likely more due to pain than anger, because the Iwa nin had Kakashi’s injured arm twisted high behind his back, and a vicious slice stained the bandages on his upper thigh red.

The Iwa jounin looked particularly pleased with himself, eyes thin with vindictive glee. Obito’s gaze travelled down the jounin’s bare arm, noting the lines of dripping red, and the glint of silver—

The point of his retractable blade winked cheerfully at Kakashi’s throat.

_We can totally take out one jounin_ , was Obito’s third thought.

Leaves rustled, chakra hummed. Rin squeaked beside him. He turned around.

_Oh_ fucking _shit_ , was his fourth.

They stood atop the small mountain of rocks, towering above the scene below them. All Obito could feel was about two centimeters tall, and six feet underground. When he and Kakashi had tag-teamed Rin’s rescue earlier, they’d entered an earth dome that had been centered in the middle of a clearing edged by bushes.

There was no clearing now.

There was a swarm of Iwa shinobi instead, pressing in at a distance that was neither threatening nor harmless and just a fraction less than predatory. Under flinty-eyed, watchful gazes, Obito could feel the air in his lungs congeal into a chilly mess that sank to the bottom of his gut. He took one step back, then another, then Rin’s weight and gossamer light chakra bloomed as a comforting presence against his back.

Kakashi struggled in his captor’s hold. “ _Don’t_ \--” He broke off with a strangled scream when the jounin yanked his arm up with a sickening crack. Anger roared in Obito’s chest; it clawed at him, hot and sharp behind his eyes. Or maybe that was his tears. He couldn’t tell.

“Stop it!” Obito shouted, half in fear, half in anger. He made a panicked, abortive reach for Kakashi.

“On your knees,” the jounin ordered, grinning with all teeth and no humour. “Hands behind your head. Try anything funny and the White Fang’s brat dies.”

He could feel Rin’s surprise between his shoulder blades, followed by muted fury.

  


“Obito…” Rin hissed out of the corner of her mouth.

“We’ll get out of this alive, Rin,” Obito muttered back with a confidence he didn’t feel. He had a plan. Sort of. All they needed to do was get Kakashi free…

The wind whispered somewhere to his left.

Obito’s feet flared with chakra, fingers flickering into half-tiger seal—

“ _Obi—_ ”

Earth erupted around them. Obito crashed unceremoniously into a wall and fell on his rear.

Cold steel, then hot breath that skimmed the back of his neck and sent an uncontrolled chill of terror racing down his spine.

“Move and you die,” murmured the shinobi whose rough hands pulled Obito’s arms behind his back and bound them painfully with ninja wire. The weight on his hip lessened as he was divested of his weapons pouches; it made him feel strangely exposed, and fear swelled up, unbidden. At his back, Rin’s chakra flickered sharply, like a candle flame guttering violently in the wind. A muted second signature moved between that, and Obito knew that she was being similarly bound and disarmed.

The hands moved, latched onto his upper arm in an uncomfortably tight grip and dragged him to his feet. Then a push propelled him across the clearing, sent him stumbling, tripping over his own feet, and crashing to his knees before Kakashi and his captor.

Rin landed beside him in the dirt a moment later. The ground sighed and let up little puffs of dust.

Up close, Kakashi seemed worse off than Obito had assumed. The visible slice of his face was steadily shading paler, even as his single eyelid drooped alarmingly. Obito could even hear the shallowness of Kakashi’s breaths, almost as if he were struggling to stay conscious.

The obvious pain did nothing to retract from the utter fury and panic in his gaze, though.

The Iwa jounin peered down at them with beady eyes and an unsettlingly gleeful grin that sent ghost ants scurrying up Obito’s arms and down his back.

“Here I was,” the jounin mused, “thinking what a shame it would be to kill my sources of information. And there Konoha is, handing me _three_ of their shinobi, and the White Fang’s brat, no less!”

A quiet rumbling noise reached Obito’s ears, coupled with a sudden oppressive heaviness and sheer _hatred_ that crackled in the air. It took him a second to realise that it was Kakashi growling, a deep rolling sound at the back of his throat. His killing intent blanketed the area. It made Obito want to hide behind Minato-sensei.

The Iwa jounin made an unimpressed noise. In one swift movement, he withdrew his blade from Kakashi’s chin and slammed the edge of his palm into the side of his neck.

Kakashi’s head jerked sideways, then he collapsed bonelessly in the arms of the jounin. The oppressive edge in the air vanished.

Rin recoiled in silent horror. Obito’s racing heart climbed so far up his throat that it clawed at his vocal chords in terror, blocking his scream and any other protest that went with it.

_Kakashi…_

Oh Sage, what would happen to them?

Kakashi usually had the answers. _You fucked up_ , he’d say, _because you’re a stupid failure of a shinobi, and we’ll die obviously, because the Shinobi rulebooks dictates that…_ Or maybe he wouldn’t, because Kakashi had changed, had seen Obito and Rin as _friends_ , had--

Had been knocked out. Had been slung over an Iwa nin’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Would not be of any help for the rest of the way because Obito hadnt been able to rescue him in time.

Obito’s last thought trailed in as the Iwa shinobi hauled them off into the forest: _Maybe I really_ am _a failure._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hamaki and the Iwa commander are canon characters. the rest are OCs which are kinda not importannt anymore

Beneath the setting sun, the battlefield was dust and silence and three hundred or so Iwa shinobi lying mangled on the ground. The _rasengan_ and _hiraishin_ used in deadly tandem had left broken bodies and slit throats in their wake. It was a massacre, Minato observed impassively, the way their lifeblood had spilled across the grass and seemed to dye the clouds pink.

Wedged between Iwa’s decimated army and the surviving fragments of Konoha’s battalion, he could not bring himself to feel regret.

The atmosphere was strangely still, a far cry from when the air had been filled with shouting and the earth was rumbled shifting. It cast a sort of liminal calm around them, one that hung heavy across their shoulders, an uneasy tranquility that raised every hair on Minato’s back and froze the breath in his lungs.

He could not bring himself to feel satisfied, either.

The sigils inked onto his _hiraishin_ kunai sang to him. Two hundred and nine of them on the field, scattered between corpses, weaved a humming melody of chakra sparks into the emptiness of the space-time void until he could locate each and every one of them with pin-point accuracy. A distinct and separate mark registered; it was much nearer than his emergency markers near Konoha, and still a distance away from where he stood. Dim in the distance, it murmured a simple bassline, shuffling steadily northeast.

Minato let out a quiet breath, and allowed the remnants of rushing adrenaline to fade; Kakashi’s team -- _his_ team -- seemed satisfactorily unaffected.

“Thank you, Minato-san.”

The speaker’s voice was hollow and rough with fatigue, and yet brimming with relief all the same. Minato turned around, away from the carnage and to the men that hovered at his back. Mimura Hamaki, temporary captain of Konoha’s whittled-down Fourth Battalion, angled his head and body into an abbreviated version of a bow. The team’s medic -- Sohiko, Minato recalled -- tending to Hamaki’s cracked ribs, clicked his tongue reproachfully.

“It was no problem, Hamaki-san,” Minato responded briskly. It had been less than a problem. Iwa’s Commander Azuma, upon seeing the scant size of Konoha’s forces, had ordered his men to toy with them instead of facing them in direct battle, not unlike a cat and its prey, driving them steadily to the brink of exhaustion. It had been an underhanded tactic, and Minato had unleashed every drop of his fury on them. “We’ll need to leave soon, in case they sent for reinforcements. Can you make it back to the base on your own?”

Hamaki scratched at the stubble on his chin, then offered a wan twitch of his lips that might have been a reassuring smile, dulled by the ache of his injuries. “Tch. Don’t worry about us, yeah?” he said, “there isn’t an Iwa nin who’d want to come near this mess anymore. We’ll make it back just fine.”

His teammates seemed to disagree.

“Where’re you going?” The words were outwardly casual, lined with the finest threads of panic and desperation. Minato’s gaze dropped to the boy that perched at the edge of a defensive ditch, wrapping a swollen ankle. A fourth teammate stood at his side with shadowed eyes, looking very much like he wanted to voice his assent.

“To find the rest of my team,” Minato answered. He could understand their sentiment. Tired, injured and alone in a war zone, even a thirty-minute run back to base could be rife with conflict. He turned, plucked a _hiraishin_ kunai out of a dead body, and wiped it easily on the grass.

“Here,” he said, tossing the weapon to Hamaki, who caught it. “If you run into any trouble, just throw that. I’ll be there in a flash.

The temporary captain grinned faintly. “That good enough for you, Yuuma, Nazo?”

Minato left the lukewarm answers and firmly delegated instructions at his back in favour of sweeping his gaze over the ruined battlefield. Faded vellum like stolen sunlight, and black steel gleamed at him out of a sea of mottled red and green and brown; kunai that carried precious information on his unique jutsu.

_Who would’ve figured,_ he thought ruefully, _that one of the largest downsides of the_ hiraishin _in a large-scale battle was the cleaning up?_

Not him, that was for sure.

Minato stole a quick breath, and _moved._

He flickered silently over the battlefield, retrieving and sealing away kunai after bloodied kunai, like an apparition that skimmed the grass and left in an erratic burst of yellow.

_Hitodama,_ Kushina had described it once, the very first time she’d seen him collect his kunai after a fight, _like the fireball souls of the dead._ It had occurred to Minato that he would never experience an external perspective of the _hiraishin_ , but he’d agreed with her nonetheless. It came

across, he felt, as remarkably accurate and, though he would never admit aloud, cool.

He left as the first rays dipped beneath the forest canopy and lit the treetops ablaze.

The sun sank lower, and lower, and by the time Minato had cleaned and sealed away his weapons, all that was left on the trees were dark ash, smouldering a deep orange, and shadows.

Quietly, he slipped between branches, doubling back for the clearing. There were still loose ends to clear up, bodies to pilfer and burn, backup teams to hunt. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, perched on the lowest branch of a tree.

In the recesses of his mind, he recognized the spark of a _hiraishin_ kunai blip quietly in space-time, feeding back a stream of zigzagging motion that headed east; Hamaki and his men, who had since vanished from the area, heading undisturbed for their destination. _And just in time too_ , Minato thought grimly as unfamiliar chakra shivered in his peripheral senses, because the place was now swarming with Iwa nin.

They came like ants, creeping out from the darkened corners of the treeline, scuttling into the clearing, silhouetted against the rising moon.

From his perch, their horror at the scene was palpable. Minato could just make out the strangled gasps and muffled cries of the shinobi, the way the moonlight trembled across their unsteady weapons, and winked off as they crashed to their knees in helpless anger.

Then a shinobi staggered towards Minato’s tree. He propped one arm against the rough bark and promptly doubled over and dry-retched. A searing rush of pity erupted in Minato’s gut. He remembered, clear as day, the reactions of Obito and Rin when they had first encountered death, and wondered if it was any different for the boy on the ground.

He peered down at the shinobi--

\--and two wide, brown eyes stared back.

“K-Konoha!” the Iwa shinobi yelped, stumbling backwards in a terrified attempt to escape. The cry rose and swelled across the field, then echoed back in tones of fear and fury, stronger than ever.

Minato dragged his gaze up. Fifty pairs of eyes glared back at him.

A half Bird seal and a second later, three _hiraishin_ kunai materialised at his fingertips.

* * *

Minato fled.

There was a thin line between cowardice and a tactical retreat, and he danced on it.

It would have been so easy to kill them all. A spray of kunai, a breath of wind, then silence and a stillness only death could give. And yet…

And yet Minato hated the simplicity of it. Hated the ease of senseless killing that the war had made him so accustomed to. No, he decided, there was no need for this batch of Iwa shinobi to die yet.

Kunai and shuriken whizzed past his ears. He dodged, and they struck the branches with muffled _thunks_. He twisted, lashing out with his own kunai, and they clattered to the forest floor.

The foliage before him was beginning to thin, and fractures of silver light streamed through the leaves. Barely meters ahead, the trees stopped, the shadows broke completely and gave way to a small, moonlit clearing.

Minato vaulted straight for the clearing, twisted around in midair, and let the moonlight wash across his face.

The cry went up. “The Yellow Flash!” “It’s the Yellow Flash!”

Minato grinned, knife-sharp and humourless. Still falling, he drew his arm back, and hurled a _hiraishin_ -tagged kunai into the mass of pursuing shinobi. The beginnings of a _rasengan_ blurred into his palm as his chakra reached for the flying weapon--

Then he felt it.

The kunai in Kakashi’s possession _screamed_. An urgent pitched burst in a split second.

Already half a step into the space-time void, Minato reached for the spark of Kakashi’s kunai instead and _pulled_ —

The world around him blinked. Then the clearing, and its shouting dissolved into coarse underbrush and the deafening roar of a waterfall.

Minato paused, rode the wave of adrenaline from his fight to its end and drew in a hurried glance of his new surroundings as he let the _rasengan_ dissipate in a soft whir.

He stood at the center of a valley-like landform. The entire area was shrouded in a spray of fine mist that danced on his skin. The surrounding line of trees was dark and gloomy, and the forest behind that like hollowed pits stretching out for miles. At his feet sat the bank of a wide, racing river, its surface marbled with white rapids and whirlpools, fed by unbroken sheets of water tumbling over the side of a towering, rugged cliff.

There were crickets chirping, deer sleeping, fireflies dancing between the trees like golden fairies.

And not a single chakra signature present.

A dark shape edged out of the corner of his eye, pulled away by the river flow. He refocused, readjusted his line of sight and snagged a view of a bobbing log and glinting black steel--

_No._

His blood ran cold. His breath left his lungs in a swooping rush, like Kushina had tackle-hugged him, only with none of the warmth.

_No, dammit._

The remote alarm system of the _hiraishin_ was experimental and flawed, with limitations that stemmed from the intrinsic nature of fuinjutsu. It was an alarm system, meant for the most desperate of emergencies. In an attempt to encompass as many possibilities as he could, Minato had only programmed the seals to respond to any velocity over a lower limit.

But for all that he’d tried to anticipate, the situation of the _hiraishin_ kunai hurtling off the side of a waterfall without its owner was never even considered.

Minato let his own tagged kunai fall -- a quick flashstep brought him _thereandback_ onto the river bank, log in hand -- and caught it before the point had even brushed the grass.

There were only two weapons embedded in the wood: the _hiraishin_ kunai that Minato had given Kakashi, and Kakashi’s own chakra tantou. Any other standard-issue kunai and shuriken, weapons that would otherwise have been in his team’s possession, were nowhere to be found.

Standard weapons taken for ammunition, personalized weapons discarded. This was not accidental. There was no doubt in his mind that his students had been captured.

By who, then? And how and _when_ and Sage, were they still _alive?_

Panic was a quivering buzz of soundlessness that thrummed between his ears and against his chest and resonated with the pounding din of the crashing waterfall. It blocked out the vestiges of rational thought, cast him into a surreal sort of weightlessness, as though he was drowning in air. His head swam with fear- _terror-guilt_ , struggling against a whirlpool of emotions and thoughts that chased each other round and round and down into chaos.

His imagination threw up scenarios, each more terrifying and gruesome than the last. Torture, mutilation, _death_. Shinobi in the wartime were not kind to children or otherwise.

But shinobi were trained for panic. And Minato was shinobi. With careful effort, he forced the roiling mass of thoughts into calm, orderly submission.

With the assumption that they were alive, he could guess that Kakashi’s team had been captured, probably somewhere upstream.

It wasn’t a stretch, also, to imagine that they had been captured by Iwa or Kusa shinobi, or that they were currently being interrogated about their intentions in enemy territory.

Their intention that was Kannabi Bridge; Kannabi Bridge that had yet to be destroyed, considering the state of non-panic that Iwa was in.

Which then left Minato with a choice: to rescue his team from Iwa, or to carry out the sabotage by himself?

For nearly the thousandth time that day, Minato dragged his consciousness across the space-time void, hurtling towards a _hiraishin_ kunai.

* * *

He appeared in an unceremonious flutter of leaves and shadows, and in an instant, was almost trampled by Hamaki’s team.

They crashed through the foliage, spitting curses and flinging weapons until Nazo, struck by a sudden realization, called for the attack to stop. “Hamaki-taichou! _Hamaki-taichou_ , it’s Minato! _Look!_ ”

For a heartbeat, Minato was frozen between Yuuma’s blades and Sohiko’s water whip as Hamaki leapt at him from behind. 

Then the moment shattered.

Yuuma careened backwards into the leaves, flailing and hacking in surprise at the branches that sprang into his face. Water burst into Minato and Sohiko’s faces as the latter lost control over his element. Hamaki’s face cycled through twelve different expressions of shock, and, failing to stop in time, he crashed straight into Minato and sent them both tumbling towards the forest floor.

“Sonnuvabitch!” Hamaki swore, gripping Minato’s wrist as he swung over a twenty-meter drop.

Minato, in turn, clung onto a branch with his other hand. Then, with very little effort, swung Hamaki first, then himself up onto the branch.

“My apologies for showing up unannounced,” he said, bowing deeply at the waist. “And thank you for not skewering me.”

Sohiko let out a muffled snort of laughter. Nazo’s lips twitched. Hamaki shot them both dirty looks before addressing Minato. “Apology accepted,” he muttered gruffly. “What do you need?”

Minato told them, in no uncertain terms. He requested one of their team’s help in the sabotage mission, escorted by one of his shadows clones, while he attempted to free his students from their captors. “It’s not easy,” he finished hoarsely, “and I understand that you’re tired after that battle. If you were to refuse--”

“How old are your students?” Sohiko interrupted. He’d gained a sort of steely look in his eyes somewhere between his plea and about two seconds ago.

“Two are twelve,” Minato answered. “One is thirteen.”

Hamaki’s callused hands took him gently by the shoulders. “Go rescue your students,” he said, “let me take care of the rest.”

There wasn’t a single expression to describe the overwhelming relief that flooded Minato right down to his toes. “Thank you,” he breathed, because it was all he could manage. “ _Thank you._ ”

He brought Hamaki back to the waterfall valley in the blink of an eye, having buried a _hiraishin_ kunai in the bushes before. He handed him a roll of explosive paper tags, rations, and a map, pointed out the directions and explained the mission objective in further detail. Then he watched him, and his shadow clone, flicker off ahead of him into the shadows with the safety of a nation on their backs.

When he could no longer tell them apart from the darkness, Minato raised his eyes to the top of the waterfall, then higher still to the silver crescent of the moon.

_Tsukiyomi-no-mikoto, watch over my teams. Please._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minato is doing a very dangerous thing, which is sharing this very top secret sabotage mission with a ninja who's exhausted and does not have the clearance, and then sending him off with just a shadow clone. but he's stressed and his team is in danger so i mean, i guess?
> 
> (he was going to face a court-martial later i think but lol i've already abandoned this fic)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings include: using genjutsu to torture a child, aftermath of torture (i mean kinda), not really descriptive eye trauma and blood. but yea this is where most of the tags come in

Time was fluid.

It surrounded her, flowed around her with the viscosity of molten lava and the forcefulness of a riptide. It was a rushing river of eddies and rapids and tossed her around, and churned dangerously, and dragged her under until she couldn’t tell up from down, or past from future, or imagination from reality.

No. Not imagination.  _ Genjustu _ .

How long had she been like this? Pain had a way of warping time, stretching the fabric to its limits, then pulling it still further. It could have been day, minutes,  _ seconds _ .

Her chakra flickered beneath her skin like an anxious hummingbird. Iwa had tossed her team into a fort constructed out of a hasty _ doton _ , suppressed her chakra with a slap-on tag and plunged her back into another interrogation genjutsu. She hadn’t seen where they’d taken her teammates.

Her core gurgled hollowly, and spat up a couple strands of chakra. She snatched at them, before the seal on the back of her neck could take them. There was only enough for one chance.

“ _ Kai! _ ”

She broke the river surface. The scene dissolved. The pain did not. She saw dull earth walls, a cell lit by a naked bulb. Shadowed eyes, glinting teeth—

Foreign chakra flared, bright and furious--

She stiffened.

\--and crashed over her like a vengeful tidal wave. It dragged her under. She tasted the coppery tang of her desperation as the waters closed over her head again.

The sky was a burning red, like liquid fire mixed in with wisps of shifting white. The ground was coarse sand and jagged rocks and broken glass, a canvas where red bloomed everywhere she stepped. The wind blew, and overwhelming heat surged into her face. It was like opening an oven, if the oven had been lit to a white heat and spat stinging grit. 

She fell to her knees, and a low cry slipped past her exhausted reflexes.

“Will you talk now, kunoichi?”

The voice resounded throughout the landscape, echoing like a hundred voices over the vast emptiness like it was everywhere and nowhere at once. It reverberated against her skull. Her world blurred, tilted dangerously, before she found her tenuous grasp on consciousness again.

“I’m a  _ shinobi _ ,” she hissed at empty air. “And  _ no _ .”

She could not. She  _ would _ not. Her team and her village was depending on her.

“What about now?”

Her right arm, hanging loosely at her side, had begun to tingle. It was a funny sort of tingling, as if something terrible were happening to it, and her senses were just struggling to process it. 

And then they did. And the tingling built to a stinging ache, which burgeoned into a blinding agony that consumed her entirely.

“I said  _ no _ .” She was gasping, crying, now, hands fisted at her sides. Her tears splashed onto the barbed ground and evaporated with quiet fizzing.

Wait.

Sarcoline sludge dripped beside her knee, hissing as it touched the burning sand.

“And now?”

Rin looked at her melting arm and screamed.

* * *

Minato had, to his estimation, travelled fifty-odd kilometers upstream without uncovering a single trace of evidence that could help locate his students.

It was utterly dark now, save for the beams of moonlight that froze the grass in silver and shimmered along the water. Searching by sight was about as useful as a hoard of blunt shuriken. Instead, Minato scoured the area with his other senses, delicately enhancing them with chakra. 

He could smell the way the forest reeked of dew and damp rot, taste the musky humidity and sense the crackle of natural energy. He could feel and hear the way the air itself seemed to sway with the gentle susurrus of the leaves, and the quiet gurgling of the river and… 

Minato paused, took a step back, then another two. Carefully, he reeled in his chakra, strand by gossamer strand, coiling them up tight within his core until the barest fragments remained. With such precise control that would have made an iryo-nin jealous, he fed the chakra to his ears and nose and stood very, very still.

The sharp tang of blood and sweat hit him almost instantly. His ears picked up the gentle  _ thwap thwap thwap  _ of rubber soles on wood, then, as he strained his ears even further, hushed voices riding on the coattails of a gentle breeze.

“… _ way things are going…squad nineteen late…” _

_ “…uck them! Juzo and his incomp…reason we’re repor…why did…” _

_ “…just a routi…don’t question the Tsuchika…orders.” _

Minato’s lips thinned grimly. Hands already halfway out of his weapons pouch, he leapt after the patrol squad, vanishing faster than fleeting thought.

* * *

The wall before them shuddered. Dust particles skittered across the ground, trembling. 

Rin did not allow herself to do the same. 

It had been eighteen minutes since the genjutsu world had finally dissolved into the plain earth walls surrounding her again. 

Ten, since Obito, blindfolded and bound, had been roughly herded in. He remained in the furthest corner of their small cell, unusually silent, hunched in on himself.

The wall shuddered again, then split evenly down the middle, shifting open to reveal a broad-shouldered jounin. He leered at them, shrewd-eyed and reeking disdain.

Rin bared her teeth.

The jounin scoffed at her obvious display of false bravado. 

“Enjoy your last hour together, little dog.”

He shrugged carelessly, movement rippling across his form, and only then did Rin see the slight wraith-like body slung on his back.

Kakashi flew forwards, shoulder striking hard against the ground. He skidded to a stop near the far wall of their cell. A pained whimper slipped through gritted teeth.

Obito’s head jerked up soundlessly. 

Her own cry left her in a haze of panic and desperation as she scrambled forward for him. “ _ Kakashi! _ ”

“Short schedule for today,” the jounin said jauntily, as if he were listing food off a menu instead of ways to inflict psychological trauma on twelve-year-olds. “Uchiha’s due to get both eyes extracted tomorrow, Little White Fang might get an interrogation, or three. And you…”

He paused, grinning with teeth too sharp and eyes too fierce.

Rin hissed at him.

“Ja ne.” Two words, carelessly tossed over his shoulder. The jounin strolled out, silhoutte like a looming shadow of tragedy.

The earth wall melded back together seamlessly with a soft groan, then it was just them again, three kids nursing wounds in a heavy silence.

Kakashi was lying motionless in the dirt, shoulders heaving as he struggled to draw breath. The bandages they’d carefully wrapped round his head and over his injured eye had been removed sometime during the interrogation. Now, dim yellow light washed his silver hair with a sickly, aged glow, and cast flickering shadows over his lowered face. Rin bit back a sob, kneeling carefully beside him, her bound hands struggling maneuver him into a more comfortable position. 

His head lolled slightly. Glistening liquid trailed down his right cheek. A drop hit the ground, instantly absorbed, leaving a dark splotch. 

Kakashi. Crying. In all three years of Team Minato’s existence, Rin had never seen Kakashi shed a tear once. Her heart clenched, fury swelling in the pit of her stomach.

“Kakashi?” Obito’s whisper drifted across their cell cautiously.

Matted silver hair shifted, shadows retreating from a pale face.

Rin sprang back with a wail of horror.

“Rin?” Obito yelped, panic seeping into his voice.

Kakashi rasped, “I’ll be fine, Rin.” He pushed himself up against the wall, turning to face her, and she muffled another furious sob in her hands.

His ruined right eye, and an empty left socket stared back at her. He  _ had _ been crying, she realised, remembering the teardrops (too heavy, too  _ dark _ ) in the soil. 

They’d been tears of blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is where all my written chapters end! cya in like 20 years when i get my next fic out lul
> 
> hope u enjoyed it XD

**Author's Note:**

> This work is abandoned for the time being. While I really enjoyed planning and writing it, I feel that it's not going anywhere in terms of plot, so i've scrapped it. It's such a shame for the stuff i've written to languish in my files, so I'm publishing this one. I've started developing a similar (but progressively drastically different) AU that will incorporate some ideas from this one though.


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